How to use your website to market your business while off living your best life
How to use your website to market your business while off living your best life
I want to introduce you to the idea of automations - these are mini automatic processes we can use to link our social media, website and OUR BUSINESS together to run some seriously slick marketing on autopilot.
Automations give you the power to attract, engage and entice potential customers into your business - even when you're sleeping, coaching your kids team, having dinner with your family or maybe just having an uninterrupted shower.
Once you understand the concepts & how it works, you're only limited by your imagination as to how you implement automations in your business.
Today, we're covering my top three automations - all of which are beginner friendly and 99% code free!
1. Delivery emails.
These are emails that are sent automatically after they're triggered by a particular action. Typically this looks like a customer filling out a form on your website, and then receiving an email automatically with information they're requesting.
This can be a great way to incentivise people giving you their contact details in exchange for valuable information (which means growing a pool of potential customers down the track - I'll elaborate in #2). This is often referred to as an opt in form - they're opting in to receive more information.
This can be anything including:
Your pricelist or packages
Your menu
Exclusive access to something
A discount code or voucher
A free tool, a guide, or a checklist to help them with a problem.
Think about the information you have in your business that gets repeatedly asked for, or info that could be valuable enough to exchange for contact details.
Setting up: create a form on your website, and link it to a tool like Zapier. Then in Zapier, you can link through to your email (like Gmail) and tell Zapier: every time someone enters their details into THIS form, send them THIS email."
That email can contain links, codes, info - WHATEVER! But imagine what it would be like if your website was automatically sending potential customers the info they need to do business with you AS WELL AS growing your database for future marketing? Without you having to lift a finger!
2. Building an email list.
Closely related to number #1, this is about sending those people filling in forms to a product like Mailchimp. Mailchimp allows you to send mass marketing emails to potential customers with goodies like:
discounts
sales
exclusive access to new products
tips, ticks and hacks.
Mailchimp makes it really easy to gather these contact details through your website and then store them for future use. And it's really easy to make emails with links, photos and text to send to them regularly.
And if you're cringing at the thought of this, remember: if you gathered those email addresses with consent (i.e. someone actively entered their name into your form) then they WANT to hear from you! As long as your emails are:
valuable and
frequent without being overwhelming
Then an email list can be a fantastic pool of potential customers waiting for the right time to do business with you.
3. Getting ahead of the game on social media
Did you know you can automate big chunks of your social media by scheduling it in advance?
If you can create a batch of content in advance, you can use Facebook's built in scheduling tools, or my personal favourite Later (the free version is A-MAZING).
This allows you to appear as though you're showing up regularly on social media without being stuck to your screen 24/7.
Now, here's a mind blowing hack sequence for you:
Imagine you created a very special offer or discount.
You created a post for Facebook & Instagram talking about that offer.
Then you scheduled it to a appear on social media - you could even schedule it to appear regularly if you want to remind people about it often.
The caption of that post contains a link to a form on your website.
By entering their details in your form, your followers get that special offer delivered automatically to them AND they get added to your database for future marketing emails.
BOOM. MIC DROP.
The biggest thing that could stop you from taking full advantage of automations is your website.
Do you have access to it? Is it easy to use? Can you create everything you need to set up automations?
If the answer is "buggered if I know" or straight up 'NOPE" then I have just the thing for you. I believe in equipping small business owners with the knowledge they need to build & run their own websites.
You can get access to my website building framework by downloading my DIY Website Handbook. It covers the step-by-step process I use to build my own client's websites and will help guide you through creating a website that can begin working for you.
